George Bernard Shaw

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

Life consists in what a person is thinking of all day.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.